WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet has been lost at sea after it fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier while it was being towed on board, the Navy said in a statement.
A U.S. official said initial reports from the scene indicated the Truman made a hard turn to evade Yemeni fire, which contributed to the fighter jet falling overboard. Yemen’s armed forces claimed on Monday to have launched a drone and missile attack on the aircraft carrier, which is in the Red Sea as part of the U.S. military’s major aggression against the country. 
“The F/A-18E was actively under tow in the hangar bay when the move crew lost control of the aircraft. The aircraft and tow tractor were lost overboard,” the statement said. “Sailors towing the aircraft took immediate action to move clear of the aircraft before it fell overboard. An investigation is underway.”
A second U.S. official told CNN that the aircraft had sunk. An individual F/A-18 fighter jet costs more than $60 million, according to the Navy.
U.S. Navy carriers – the world’s largest warships at nearly 1,100 feet long and with a displacement of almost 100,000 tons – are claimed to maneuverable for their size.
Powered by two nuclear reactors driving four propeller shafts, Nimitz-class carriers like the Truman are touted as being able to reach speeds in excess of 34 mph.
The exact details of the turn the Truman made to avoid the Yemeni fire have not been released, but photos and videos of the ship and other Nimitz-class carriers on the Pentagon’s website show the massive vessels can take on a substantial list in a high-speed turn.
Carl Schuster, a former U.S. Navy captain, told CNN that carriers trying to avoid a missile attack use a “zig-zag” tactic.
“You typically do a series of alternating 30- to 40-degree turns. Each takes about 30 seconds each way, but the turn starts sharply. It is like riding in a zig-zagging car,” Schuster said.
“The ship leans about 10 to 15 degrees into the turn, but it displaces the ship about 100 to 200 yards from any likely aim point” if the ship is moving at maximum speed, he said.
The Truman Carrier Strike Group is deployed in West Asia and was in the Red Sea at the time of the incident.  
The Truman has repeatedly been targeted in attacks by Yemeni forces. It made headlines in February when it collided with a merchant ship near Egypt. Another F/A-18 from the Truman was also “mistakenly fired” upon and shot down by the cruiser USS Gettysburg in the Red Sea in December.
Other U.S. Navy ships in the region have also come under retaliatory Yemeni fire. In early 2024, a U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea had to use its Phalanx Close-In
 Weapon System, its last line of defense to missile attacks, when a Yemeni-fired cruise missile got as near as a mile away – and therefore seconds from impact.
The Yemeni targeting of U.S. warships in the region began after the U.S. Navy stepped in to try to prevent the Ansarullah resistance movement from hitting ships heading for Israeli settlements in protest of the Zionist regime’s invasion of Gaza in October 2023.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has stepped up airstrikes on Yemen, prompting retaliatory operations against U.S. warships by Ansarullah and its allies in the Yemeni army. 
“Yemen will not back down from continuing its support operations for the Palestinian people until the Israeli aggression on Gaza stops and the siege is lifted,” the armed forces in Yemen said in a statement earlier this month after U.S. airstrikes on an oil port in western Yemen killed dozens of people.
Ansarullah said the U.S.’ “aggression” against Yemen would “only lead to further targeting, engagement, and confrontation.”
Yemen on Monday said a U.S. airstrike hit a prison holding African migrants, killing 68 people. The U.S. military made no immediate comment. 
On Tuesday, an unnamed American official quoted by AFP confirmed that the United States has lost seven multi-million-dollar MQ-9 Reaper drones in the Yemen area since March 15.
Washington launched the latest round of its air raids against Yemen in mid-March, and MQ-9s can be used for both reconnaissance — a key aspect of U.S. efforts to identify and target weaponry the country’s forces are using to target shipping in the region — as well as strikes.
“There have been seven MQ-9s that have gone down since March 15,” the U.S. official said on condition of anonymity, without specifying what has caused the loss of the drones, which cost around $30 million apiece, AFP reported.
The U.S. was hoping to achieve air superiority over Yemen within 30 days, officials said this week, and degrade the country’s air defense systems enough to begin a new phase focusing on ramping up intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance of senior resistance leaders in order to target and kill them.
But the consistent loss of the drones has made it more difficult for the U.S. to degrade the country’s combat capabilities.
The Americna intelligence community has assessed recently that over nearly six weeks of U.S. bombing, Yemen’s ability and intent to keep lobbing missiles at U.S. and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and at Israel is little changed, as is its command-and-control structure. 
Yemeni fighters have long proven to be extremely resilient, burying their equipment deep underground. They withstood a yearslong campaign by Saudi Arabia to eliminate them, and the Biden administration attacked them for over a year with limited impact.
The costs of the intensified aggression, meanwhile, are only rising. The operation cost the U.S. nearly $1 billion in just the first three weeks, and the U.S. has continued striking Yemen daily.